Tag #152158 - Interview #78238 (maya kaganskaya)

We had to separate: Uncle Moshe, his family and my grandfather and grandmother boarded a train in the direction of Lugansk. Later they reached Fergana in Uzbekistan. Uncle Nochim, his family, my mother and I started on our way. We covered another 30 kilometers before some other military confiscated the remaining horse. We had to think of an alternative. Uncle Nochim had a permission enabling him and his family to take any train. We boarded the first transit train transporting damaged tanks. There were only those tanks and our family on the train. We reached Poltava [regional town in Ukraine, 250 km east of Kiev] where we changed for a train with refugees. This was a freight train. We reached Kharkov [regional town in Ukraine, 550 km east of Kiev] and from there we moved on to Stalingrad. In Kharkov we met a family from Vasilkov. Their daughter was the same age as I. There was another Jewish family from Bessarabia. I met a Ukrainian boy, Mykhailo. He sang Ukrainian songs beautifully. He and I sang Ukrainian songs, Russian ballads, popular Soviet songs and I also sang Jewish songs. I enjoyed it and was sad at the same time. I didn't even notice the discomforts caused by evacuation and wartime; lack of food and water. I believed that everything would be fine. We reached Stalingrad in a relatively short time: 18 days.

We stayed in Stalingrad for several hours before we boarded another train that took us to a fish farm kolkhoz 30 on the Volga in the villages of Bolshoy Tuzuklei and Maly Tuzuklei, Stalingrad region. It was almost 2,000 kilometers from home. The management of the kolkhoz was notified that there was a train to arrive. There was a ceremonious meeting: the local leadership and farmers were waiting for us in the central square near the village council. Farmers offered us accommodation in their houses. The director of the local primary school offered us to stay in his house: he wanted to have a family of a teacher to stay with them. There was a clay hut in his yard that he offered to us. He gave us a big samovar and showed a pile of corns to be used to stoke a stove.

So we were in evacuation. My mother and I, Uncle Nochim and his wife went to work in a vegetable crew in the kolkhoz. This was early August and we picked cucumbers, tomatoes, melons and huge water melons. At the beginning of the war we received enough bread: one kilo for a working person and 600 grams for a dependant. There was enough fruit and vegetables and I gained weight and got sun-tanned in a few weeks.